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The Death of the Progressive-Left

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Mike Lumish
Mike Lumish is a PhD in American history from the Pennsylvania State University and has taught at PSU, San Francisco
… [More]State University, and the City College of San Francisco. He regularly publishes on the Arab-Israel conflict at the Times of Israel and at his own blog, Israel Thrives (http://israel-thrives.blogspot.com/). He has in recent years given conference papers on American cultural and intellectual history at The International Society for the History of Behavioral and Social Sciences in Dublin, Ireland, as well as at the Western Historical Association in Phoenix, Arizona and the American Cultural Association in New Orleans, Louisiana. Lumish is also the founding editor of the scholarly on-line discussion forum H-1960s. He can be contacted at mike.lumish@gmail.com. [Less]

Express News had earlier reported that around 100 houses were burnt by the mob.

Eyewitnesses said that the mob broke into the houses, looted them and burnt the remaining belongings on the roads…

On Friday, a mob of almost 3,000 people forced the Christian community to flee for their lives, leaving behind their houses and possessions unprotected.

The charged group had gathered around Joseph Colony on Noor Road, led by Shafiq Ahmed, who was in search of the accused Savan, alias Bubby. The mob then attacked Savan’s house, setting it on fire and pelting it with stones. Other houses in the locality – home to about 150 Christian families – were also attacked. Many residents, including women and children, hastily fled to save themselves.

If “peace activists” or those concerned with “social justice” or “universal human rights” actually cared about any of those things they would object to this atrocity, but they do not object.

One of the themes of Israel Thrives is that the progressive-left as a movement has betrayed its own values due to an unspoken, unacknowledged tension between the ideal of multiculturalism and the ideal of universal human rights. Since, over the course of many years, the multicultural ideal has essentially won this conflict, it means that universal human rights is simply no longer on the progressive-left agenda, but what is social justice without universal human rights?

Universal human rights is at the core of what the progressive movement allegedly stands for. If they do not stand for that then they do not stand for anything. And the truth of the matter is that they do not stand for anything. I have lost all respect for both feminism and the peace movement because both of these movements have betrayed their own values by abandoning women, Gay people, and Jews to the most horrendous form of violent bigotry imaginable throughout the Muslim Middle East.

Because they are absolutely terrified of being accused of “Islamophobia” they turn a blind eye to the rise of Islamic fascism and therefore refuse to stand up for the victims of it. What I find most offensive, however, is the fact that so many “progressive Zionists” cannot bring themselves to stand up for the Jews in the Middle East by pointing out that they are subject to an intense campaign of vilification that often leads to violence coming out of political Islam.

One cannot be “pro-Israel” or “pro-Jewish” and yet turn a blind eye to Islamic fascism in that part of the world. To be “pro-Jewish” and yet ignore widespread Arab-Muslim genocidal hatred toward Jews would be something akin to African-American civil rights activists pretending that slavery never happened or that Jim Crow should not have been denounced because to do so would be racist toward white people.

Ultimately, of course, the reason that the progressive movement refuses to stand up to political Islam is because the progressive-left is the foremost racist political movement in the west today outside of political Islam, itself. They claim to be “anti-racist” but they are not “anti-racist.” Whether they recognize it or not they are, in fact, the very epitome of racism because they treat Arab-Muslim peoples in the Middle East as if they are small children who must be indulged in even their very worst behavior.

100 Christian houses were burned by a crazed mob in Lahore, Pakistan because some Christian allegedly blasphemed against Islam and yet the progressive-left has no problem with this whatsoever. Or, if they do have a problem with it, they simply cannot bring themselves to stand up to this kind of terrible injustice because they consider doing so to be racist in itself.

And thus the progressive-left as a political movement is dead.

I come out of the progressive movement and for many years was a liberal Democrat, but when I look back at the movement all I see is a desolate landscape like something out of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. In the unspoken and unacknowledged tension between multiculturalism and universal human rights, the former has strangled the latter, killing whatever meaning that there may have been to the movement that fought against slavery, that championed the unions and economic justice, and that stood up for women and Gay people and ethnic minorities and for the planet, itself.

They allowed their own racism to drain the life out of their movement… out of our movement.

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